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The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. By Richard White. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xvi + 544 pp. Cloth, $69.50, ISBN 0-521-37104-X. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-521-42460-7.)
Richard White employs many metaphors in this book, the most significant of which is the title and thesis of the book. The "middle ground" is not only the physical space that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French called the pays d'en haut but also the social space the Indian tribes and the European and American colonial powers invented there. White argues that because neither Indian nor white societies could clearly dominate the other in this area between the Iroquois conquest of Huronia and the end of the War of 1812, mutual accommodation and a transacculturative social solution arose out of the misunderstandings and the new meanings...